Windwalker (Bedlam #1)

The Fall

I heard it before I ever saw it, being under a tarp as I was. It sounded like a market, gathered at what was likely a crossroads. Hawkers were crying themselves hoarse, steam hissed from somewhere close, and there were all sorts of shouts—from grunts, and prigs, and growling mutts. All the denizens of the Below.

The tarp was ripped away, and I blinked against sudden light. The fog was alive with lights. Leeries had lit up the crossroads till it glowed. I tried to twitch, but the eel had me tight.

Rock and his lackeys dragged us rats from the cart, and dropped us to land as we might. Plop. Muck cushioned my fall against stone. Cobblestones. This wasn't just any crossroads market. This was the market.

The Bazaar.

But what other destination would there be for a cartload of rats? I didn't really know. Being a rat, the realm of my knowledge was slim, but I had heard rumors, whispers in the dim, which made the likes of me keep clear of any road with stone underfoot.

I would've spat in the name of Luck, but there was the matter of the eel. Right. I turned my eyes from the brightness, and concentrated inward, to that starving, empty pit I called a gut. A muscle twitched. I'd flexed my stomach! But before I could triumph overly much, a catcher grabbed my ankle and dragged me across the square.

I was privy to a great deal of muck on that brief journey. And feet. Muck's the only word for it. It's a stew of swampy mud, rubbish, and shit simmering under a thousand feet. It clings to everything. The denizens of the Below are born from muck, and we go right back into it when we die. Our bones give it a grisly texture.

The other rats and me were thrown into a cage. A rusty metal door clanged shut, and the eel released its paralyzing grip, but not its hold. I could move again.

I grabbed a bar and hauled myself to my feet. My head hit the top of the cage, and I hunched down. The cage was half my height, which wasn't very high at all.

Muck-caked boots stomped by as I blinked against the light. Figures came out of the fog draped head to toe in various clothing: hooded cloaks, longcoats, mud slickers, even a few with armor that hissed and steamed with every step. And respirators. Not makeshift respirators like mine, but the real deal. The natty kind with designs, even a few with gold inlays. And goggles that weren't pieced together from broken bits. There was money here.

If the buyers glanced our way, I didn't know—I stared awestruck at a stone monolith. Limited life that I'd had, I'd heard they were called towers once upon a time. But I'd never seen one so big. It dominated the fogline. A maze of iron pipes twisted around its foundation before climbing upwards. Leeries had lit lamps all along its base, but even without those lights, the pipes were eerily visible. Sickly-green lichen glowed faintly on the iron, giving me the impression of a great stone body with its guts turned inside out.

I pressed my cheek to the bars, and rolled my eye, trying to get a better view. As a rule, we rats stayed as far away from towers as we did from stone underfoot. Both were bad luck.

A crier was hawking his wares from a nearby stage. "Good breeding stock! Clear eyes. Teeth intact! Scared witless!"

"Ten coils!" a man's voice answered.

Chains rattled nearby. And food. Scents of curry and meat called to my stomach, which growled a hearty response.

A fellow rat in the corner of our cage was crying. We were all caked with muck and wearing dumpy respirators; the only thing visible was our eyes. Red. That's where we got our names. Rats, the four-legged kind, have red eyes and so did we. We were the lowest of the low in the Below. We weren't even boys or girls, just rats—an ungendered mass of unwanted vermin.